Do you undertake professional learning in TEAMS?

The common mantra

There's an old mantra, still prevalent amongst teachers and school leaders today, and it goes like this: ​

"Send ’Jo’ to the course. When Jo returns, we’ll get him to share the most important points with the whole department. That way we only pay for one, but we all benefit"

What’s wrong with this picture?

​The 'Send one but we all benefit' strategy can work for theory-based courses that explore education initiatives with no practical component. If we are honest, such courses can usually be summed up by a few paragraphs for a short PowerPoint and can be easily shared upon the teacher’s return to school.

Worthy courses

However, I tend to hold the view that unless a course creates tangible, positive, in-classroom change for the attendees, then it is questionable that the course is worth undertaking in the first place.

So let's talk about the situation where a teacher manages to find his or her way into a genuine, change-inducing professional learning experience. For the record, I am mostly referring to online professional learning because such a course needs to be a long-term, experiential journey, one requiring participants to implement strategies and skills with their students and then to reflect and report back to other attendees on their implementation experiences.

By the end of the course, the teacher will have experienced a level of profound renewal in some aspect of their teaching. The teacher will have experienced - on some level - a paradigm shift in the way they operate, an important aspect of their teaching is forever changed. And therein lies the validity that the course was valuable.

Online professional learning

The reason I am referring to online professional learning is because the aspects and outcomes mentioned above are most easily achieved through an experiential, long-term online experience.

The tragedy of the above scenario is that typically, it is only one individual who becomes enrolled in such a professional learning journey. But what if the entire department - or at least several members of the department - had been on that same learning journey?

Now, back to the mantra that kicked-off this article ‘Send one along and we all benefit’.

Sometimes it is the Head of Department who experiences the shift; sometimes it is one inspired colleague. Either way, Jo wants to share the new found inspiration with colleagues. They know that the substance of their paradigm shift would also greatly benefit Jo's colleagues - if only Jo could somehow transfer the rekindled passion. And so the sharing begins. 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there. The colleagues nod and shrug. Papers are shuffled. The clock gets watched. Some roll their eyes thinking “There she goes again, all fired up with fluff”. Others think “Wow, these ideas are good, I’m happy for her”, but with no intention for implementation. ​

The point of the matter is this ...

When a professional learning journey inspires significant change in a teacher, the change is not just a result of the newly implemented strategies.

The change is a result of several factors:- The foundation which was laid by the course which produced the necessary mind shift in the teacher - The resulting mind shift, enabling the teacher to successfully run the strategies- The implementation of those strategies- The reflection and reporting on the implementation experiences

The whole professional learning experience is likely the result of a decade of development, of running PL with teachers. And that decade of development and the above change-inducing factors cannot be replicated in a few 30-minute sessions of sharing.

The solution is to undertake quality, change-inducing professional learning in TEAMs.

The one risk. ​

There is a risk of course, and it is this: What if you enrol a departmental TEAM into a course and then find the course to be not aligned to departmental aims? What if the course isn’t all that good?

​Two solutions

Solution One:

Have one teacher undertake the course as an individual. If the course proves worthy, then enrol the TEAM into the course at a future date. The original participant re-enrols for free and becomes the TEAM Leader, assisting with encouragement and logistics on-site colleagues.

Solution Two:

(You’ll need the provider to be on board with this) Commit your team to genuinely engaging in the course. At the halfway mark if your team is not gaining value then the provider offers a refund. But no refunds for anyone who has not logged in or genuinely engaged for half the course. In this way you don’t have the risk of paying for a TEAM only to find the course never created change.

Which providers?

It’s a giveaway that this article is in some way promoting Learn Implement Share - it is, after all, housed on the Learn Implement Share Blog! Obviously, Learn Implement Share online courses are in synch with the message and options outlined in this article. I would also hope that many of the providers of quality, long-term, online change-inducing PL are already offering similar arrangements.

What do you think of the TEAM PL model described above? We'd love your thoughts. (Your email address will not be required)